Amanda Terkel
Amanda Terkel
Amanda Terkel is an American journalist. She is a Senior Political Reporter and Politics Managing Editor at the Huffington Post
Early Life & Education
Amanda Terkel is originally from Western New York.
She graduated from Colgate University magna cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science. She was part of Phi Beta Kappa.
Career
Amanda Terkel is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post . [1] Previously, she served as Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and the Managing Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org. Amanda has also served as the Center’s Special Assistant for Strategic Planning and has experience on various national and state-level political campaigns and in government offices.
Controversies with Jesse Watters
Uncut Interaction Between Jesse Watters And Ryan Grim At White House Correspondents' Dinner
In 2009, while working as a blogger for ThinkProgress, Amanda wrote a post that was critical of Bill O'Reilly. She criticized O'Reilly for making degrading comments to rape survivors and still speaking at a fundraiser for a charity helping rape survivors. O'Reilly implied that an 18-year-old woman who had been raped and murdered was at fault because she had been drinking and wearing, in his view, immodest clothing.
In response to that post, O'Reilly sent Jesse Watters, who works for him, out to ambush me while I was on vacation in Virginia.
On March 22, 2009, Watters accosted Amanda and asked why I was causing "pain and suffering" to rape victims and their families.
According to Amanda:
He (Watters)never introduced himself and didn't give any context for what he was saying, he simply shouted questions as I tried to switch out of vacation mode and remember the short post I had written weeks earlier.
In 2016, at an MSNBC after party after the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Jesse Watters got into a fight with Huffington Post Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim. Grim had tried to get Watters to apologize to Amanda Terkel over the 2009 incident while filming. However Amanda refused to speak to him even after Grim insisted. Once Watters realized he was being filmed he grabbed Grim's phone and threw it which lead to a fight between the two men.